Since an error in a puzzle renders it unsolvable, isn't it kind of nonsense that we can only mark it for possible errors after we have solved it?

I understand that allowing players to do this before solving the puzzle will result in a number of false alarms from people who want to blame the puzzle for their own inability to solve it, but it just seems silly that the option of pointing out a possible error only appears after the puzzle is solved. We can see how few people actually bother to rank their puzzles. I'm sure the number of error alerts from players would be manageable for administrators to verify.

I'm going to tell you why this won't work. But, it's a great suggestion for people who are not competing, as a way for them to learn some of the difficult quotes.

I do crosswords on a site that shows incorrect letters as red. When I get stuck, I just stay on a square and type the alphabet until a black letter comes up. It's a built-in way of cheating, and there is a setting for those who don't want the help.

If folks here had a feature like that, it would be "worse" (depending on your point of view) than a hint button. There would be less true solving, merely eliminating wrong possibilities.

Back in the day, long, long ago, we did have an error report feature on the main page, where folks could report problems with quotes before they were solved. We'd receive about 50-100 incorrect error submissions a day from people who couldn't solve a puzzle and just assumed it was wrong. It just wasn't tenable.

At this point, our puzzle library has been played so thoroughly that I'd wager practically all of the major typos and mistakes have long since been remedied. A few still remain, undoubtedly, and we fix them as they're reported, but errors these days aren't as big of a problem as they were when we first started in 2007 with our original library of quotes.

While we're on the topic, we will be adding a significant number of new puzzles to the rotation shortly - probably the biggest influx of new quotes since we first started the site (about a 25% increase). These have been hand-selected and individually checked for errors.